6 Responses to Heinrich Interview.

Some of the questions made me crack up, though – like the one on p. 16 (in the file), about the supposed “robbery” in explotiation. The author of the interview, Wei Xiaoping, had previously written an article on Marx, Rawls and Nozick, where she puts forward an absolutely atrocious interpretation of Marx, confusing, among other things, constant and fixed capital, and saying things like:

“Marx’s contribution lies in disclosing the secret, basic to capitalism, in which the
workers are paid wages that are not equal to, and are in fact less than, the price of the
force of labor expended in their work. The missing value, which is not paid for by the
capitalist, is the profit of capital: that is, the value beyond the price of labor, which is
known as surplus value.”

Jura and HR,
While I agree with Heinrich’s point that Marx is specifically avoiding talk of justice, and eternal norms, he does almost put his foot in his mouth. In response to the interviewer’s question about the worker being “robbed”, Heinrich says this is not the case and then tells her to check the end of chapter 15. At the end of chapter 15 we find:

“In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of ROBBING the labourer, but of robbing the soil…”

The interviewer is not the first person to step away from capital feeling that the worker is being robbed, stolen from, etc. That exploitation is more than a algebraic formula S/V. I agree with Heinrich that Marx is avoiding all talks of timeless justice, but I don’t think it’s completely asinine to step away from Capital and think someone’s been robbed either. Moreover, I think Marx writes in such a way that he wants his reader to have that feeling, albeit they cannot and should not appeal to justice claims.

Sorry to double post, I just like talking about this stuff.
I would think Rethinking Marxism would know better than publish that type of entry…? My understanding was that Wolff and Resnick, among others, are editors, and thus savvy enough to see the errors in her argument.